Jeffrey Paul Delisle was sentenced Friday to 20 years in prison for selling security information to Russia.

“Everyone recognizes it’s necessary to separate persons who have done these things from society for a considerable amount of time,” Chief Judge Patrick Curran said in Halifax provincial court.

“I’m satisfied that a person who discloses state secrets ... commits a grave offence.”

The Crown argued that Delisle damaged Canada’s relations with its allies, endangered intelligence agents and exposed their methods of gathering top-secret material.

Delisle’s sentence actually amounts to 18 years and five months because of time the navy intelligence officer has already served since his arrest in January 2012.

Curran said he had not deliberated day and night but “it took a long time and I have considered everything.”

He said he reached his decision on the sentence Wednesday night. He ultimately agreed with the Crown, which had asked for at least a 20-year sentence.

The defence had suggested a sentence of nine to 10 years for the Lower Sackville native.

The judge said Delisle saved himself even more prison time by coming clean with the RCMP, calling his confession a “mitigating factor.”

If Delisle hadn’t spoken frankly after he was arrested, “a sentence in excess of 20 years would have been called for,” Curran said.

The judge also ordered Delisle to pay a fine of nearly $112,000, a sum roughly equal to the amount Delisle collected from his Russian bosses over 4 1/2 years.

At the end of Delisle’s sentence, he will have another 20 years to pay the fine. If he fails to do so, he will be sent back to prison for two more years, Curran said.

While the judge spoke, Delisle’s family, including his mother and two daughters, sat in the front row of the packed courtroom. The judge delivered the sentence just before 3 p.m.

Neither Delisle, 42, nor his family betrayed much emotion during the sentencing. When Delisle was led into the courtroom, he made brief eye contact with them as he pulled his hood back but he didn’t speak with them.

The innocuous-looking man, heavy-set with light brown hair balding at the crown, wore a blue sweatshirt and blue jeans to court.

Curran noted there was little Canadian case law to guide his decision on sentencing.

He said Delisle caused real damage, and his tale of heartbreak leading him to become a spy didn’t add up.

“Mr. Delisle seemed to attribute his decision to betray his country to the breakup of his marriage,” the judge said.

“True, his life was at a low point.”

But Delisle continued to sell national secrets for several years and had plans to stay on the Russian payroll as a civilian go-between for other agents operating in the country once he left the military, the judge said.

Delisle received regular payments over 4 1/2 years totalling more than $71,000, showing that Russia “clearly considered what he had done ... to be significant,” Curran said.

It took a tip from the FBI, which noticed suspicious financial transactions, for the RCMP to look into Delisle’s activities. He was arrested after authorities intercepted two messages he tried to pass on to the Russians.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has said Delisle’s crimes could mean it receives less intelligence from allies in the future, and it is still assessing the fallout from his actions.

The sub-lieutenant is the first person to be sentenced under the decade-old Security of Information Act passed after the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

Delisle confessed to the RCMP in January of last year to selling secrets while he was posted in Halifax, Bedford, Ottawa and Kingston, Ont.

He pleaded guilty last October to one count each of passing information to a foreign entity that could harm Canada’s interests, trying to pass information to a foreign entity that could harm Canada’s interests, and breach of trust.

On the latter two charges, he was sentenced to nine years and five years respectively, to be served concurrently with his 20-year sentence.

Curran acknowledged the testimony of security and military expert witnesses who said considerable resources have been dedicated to fixing security weaknesses that Delisle exploited. But the judge also criticized Canada’s intelligence community, pointing out that “there would be far less disruption to the security system if the corrections took place in the ordinary course of things rather than in response to a crisis.”

Canada’s chief of defence staff, Gen. Tom Lawson, issued a statement Friday afternoon saying the military is “actively pursuing measures to improve and enhance all facets of our security procedures.”

Robert Currie, a professor of international criminal law at Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law, said Delisle’s case shows that breaches of the Security of Information Act will be taken seriously by the courts.

“The message that’s being sent is one of denunciation ... and also one of deterrence,” Currie said. “The goal is to demotivate anybody who wants to betray a position of trust like this.

“It’s significant that (Delisle) wasn’t ideologically motivated here, and I think that’s why the Crown didn’t ask for a life sentence, which was available to them under the act.

“The minimum threshold for breaches of this act, at this moment, has been set very high.”

Currie said Ottawa would be watching the judge’s decision closely.

“I think the Canadian government is taking the American position very seriously, in that they wanted to be seen to be punishing this, and dealing with it as harshly as possible.”

Defence lawyer Mike Taylor told reporters that the stiff sentence came as a surprise to Delisle.

“He’s still a little bit in shock. It’s a significant sentence that he received, and one that quite frankly I don’t think he was expecting,” Taylor said.

He said he will review the decision to see if there are grounds to appeal.

He called the prison term “a huge deterrent-type of sentence that anyone would have to take notice of.”

Taylor speculated that Delisle could apply for parole in a little over six years.

Delisle has been held in protective custody since his arrest. Taylor could not say whether that will continue once he is transferred to a federal penitentiary.

Delisle was an intelligence officer working at Halifax’s HMCS Trinity, the military’s intelligence centre on the East Coast, when he was caught. He had access to several top-secret databases.

He told his RCMP interrogator he used a crude system of copying information to floppy disks from a secure computer and then onto memory sticks from a non-secure computer to smuggle the information out of the unit.

He told the RCMP he walked into the Russian Embassy in Ottawa in July 2007 and offered his services.

At the time of his arrest last year, Delisle was in the midst of moving his girlfriend into his rented home in Bedford that he shared with his children.

At that time, one of his daughters was a student at Charles P. Allen High School in Bedford.

His two young sons are reported to have moved in with their mother, his ex-wife, in Ontario.